Congrats to Ireland

[TheMastersSon]

They struck down their Vatican-sponsored constitutional amendment that outrageously (imo) gave equal protection rights to blobs of cells inside women's bodies. The vote was almost exactly 2/3 to 1/3 to overturn it. If only Kansas was as honest.

 

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-44256152

Edited May 27, 2018 by TheMastersSon

[kthompsen]

I don't know what to congratulate them about. I understand that it needs to be dealt with more on a case-by-case basis and things shouldn't be extremely rigid... but either way, abortion is not a happy event for anyone. Be it Pro-Life or Choice. The whole public debate on abortion lately has gotten just plain obnoxious. Like Lena Dunham saying she WISHED she could have an abortion. lol.. who the hell wishes for that? This is the definition of "trying too hard". Trying too hard to be as opposite to the Pro-Life side as possible.. As if being Pro-Choice is about WANTING abortions. The average women would never enjoy it. Or the financial or hopeless situations or whatever extenuating circumstances that put them there.

 

It's about as stupid as saying a hiker who got trapped under rocks and had to cut off his foot was doing a GOOD thing. It was just survival and doing what was necessary. The "good thing" he would have wished for is never having been in that situation in the first place.

 

edit: I'm not defending the Vatican or trying to engage in a religious debate btw. They have their own slew of problems. This is just my rant on one aspect of contemporary abortion debates.

 

And strangely, Roy Batty is on my screen at the moment. Tears of Rain. lol. I think even he... a murderous AI and the product of pure materialism.. embraced life more than the Lena Dunham types. Go figure. These vapid people aren't helping their side at all. The implications of what they say displays a truly wasteful mentality.

Edited May 27, 2018 by kthompsen

[TheMastersSon]

IMO the congratulations are in order for Ireland seeing through the emotional side of the abortion issue and opting instead for the intelligent and practical approach to it. 80% of self-identified conservatives in our country say they favor laws limiting abortion in some or all cases, over 80% of the same people also say they would prefer government not intrude if their own daughter had an unwanted pregnancy. In other words, it is one thing to say you favor abortion laws, it is an entirely different matter to look your own pregnant daughter in the eye and tell her her pregnancy decision is no longer her own to make, but Donald Trump's. Or your state's governor's. Or Mike Pence's. Or even the Vatican's. At least in our country, any self-respecting woman would tell you where to put your laws and those who make them. It's proper to respond that way since Mike Pence, the pope etc are not the ones who must bear the pains and sacrifices of pregnancy and childbirth. Women must do so.

 

My post was informational and I was going to append it to a past thread on abortion, but it's locked (correctly imo), and imo it's inevitable that any discussion on abortion will be eventually closed due to religious debate. As a kid I was taught and I still believe our Creator is perfectly aware of the entire fate of every single living being, from its start to its end. The concept is called predestination and it's common among most of the world's major religions. IMO no woman should ever be made to feel badly about an unwanted pregnancy or her chosen response to it, for the exact same reason no man should ever be made to feel badly about masturbation. Egg or sperm, or even fertilized egg, the material is definitely human and definitely alive, this does not magically enable any of these cells to hold a birth certificates in its hands -- and thus it most certainly does not entitle these cells to any civil rights including and especially equal protection. I wish I was a judge on this one, just so I could tell the right-to-lifers to please call me if they ever hear of a single human fetus that has ever exercised any constitutional rights. Until it's born and independent of the mother physically (this "viability" nonsense was just a first foot in the door for the Vatican in our country and nothing else) the government has and can have no interest in what's occurring inside women's bodies. No potential state interest trumps that of a woman's right to control her own bodily functions including her reproductive systems.

 

IMO abortion is the ultimate hot button issue. Regardless of country about 1/3 of people speak from emotion instead of logic, and the gut instinct is to rush to the defense of poor helpless fetuses inside women's bodies. But according to predestination the protection is entirely unnecessary. Our Creator already and perfectly knows which eggs and sperm and fetuses make it to birth, and which ones don't. Thus moral outrage about abortion (and homosexuality, masturbation etc) is necessarily concurrent with ignorance (intentional or not) of predestination. And once it is ignored, history has proven that no bottom exists to the human stupidity pit. In Iran they amputate the hands of convicted masturbators, gangs of clergy-police hunt down gay people, castrate them on the spot and leave them to bleed to death etc, all justified as protection of the "order of nature". Welcome to God's will as interpreted by abject human ignorance and stupidity.

Edited May 27, 2018 by TheMastersSon

[kthompsen]

Thanks for your thoughts. I'm not sure what to add myself other than what I already did. I am religious myself, so it's hard to sidestep that entirely with this subject (but I was trying). One reason I wouldn't want to be associated with the Vatican though is they have problems respecting the lives of grown children (rather than the unborn). I know there are many decent Catholics completely unassociated with that tragedy, but it's best if the leadership stays quiet and sort out their own affairs. As for the Irish, one of my favorite singers to this day is Sinead O'Connor. She called out the Vatican long ago about this, before it was popular. Good on her.

 

As for Presdestination, that's more of an Augustinian/Calvinist thing (at least when it comes to the more systematic outlooks on it). I am Orthodox. We acknowledge predestination, but don't bother trying to figuring it out. Trying to systematize anything is kind of popular in the West in general, I would say.. be it Religious or Secular. I wouldn't incorporate it into my thinking, personally.

[TheMastersSon]

We acknowledge predestination, but don't bother trying to figuring it out.

I was born and raised in the RCC and that's moreless their position too. But the truth is, if they honestly admitted their limited understanding of it, they'd refrain from taking any final position on abortion or gay rights. It's specifically why I walked away from them in my teen years, imo they amount to a political organization with financial interests, not a religion. A substantial portion of the money plopped into baskets every day goes to pay legal settlements for convicted child abusers. That's not to deride their charitable efforts which stand as the greatest in human history. Still imo it's innate hypocrisy to both claim limited understanding of something, and then to presume final judgment based on the same limited understanding. I firmly believe that everything ever written by humans was written by humans, and the claim that some of it was written by some entity other than humans is the start of all religious delusion. And it's how people justify the replacement of God's will with their own biases, bigotries and other cultural conditioning.

 

With that in mind, I believe the authors of all religious texts were no less prone to ingrained cultural homophobia and misogyny than anybody else. I don't believe God wishes any created being to be aborted, I also admit complete ignorance of the larger plan, and have stopped even trying to classify most anything as objectively good or evil. The answer to almost all questions in the universe is it depends. And I refuse to believe God wishes our primarily male civil governments and almost exclusively male religious leaders to stick their noses inside women's uteruses. They're almost exclusively male noses for a reason. Civil laws against murder are necessary to protect the established and existing civil rights of a country's citizens. Exactly as they just did with same-sex marriage, the Vatican and others are attempting to turn our constitutions and civil laws into weapons of rights repression, with forcibly compromised and even in a few cases ignored constitutional rights of large segments of our population. In the case of the RCC they've been doing it for two millenia, the same political interference got them tossed out of Western Europe during the first third of last century. And now they're primarily responsible for permanently mucked up constitutions clear across our country. When the "defense of marriage" camp was finally sued into releasing their sponsor list (during the Prop 8 lawsuits in CA), it was discoverd the RCC, LDS and their myriad affiliated businesses accounted for just under 70% of the total campaign funding. Thanks to their tax exempt status they amount to tax-free PACs who are free to organize to introduce and pass civil laws and even propose constitutional amendments that affect everybody, regardless of religious denomination. Their current PC term for this fascism is "religious freedom", as our courts, case by case, explain to them that their right to religious freedom ends at everybody else's right to not subscribe to their own chosen set of religious beliefs.

Edited May 28, 2018 by TheMastersSon

[kthompsen]

To be fair, the Irish were originally Orthodox themselves. I wouldn't say it's entirely different. St. Patrick and St. Brigid are great saints to the Orthodox too. They just have nothing to do with the Vatican.

 

I'll just close by saying that I respect the notion of Choice and Freedom greatly... but this is what actually pushes me to be Pro-Life. I believe conceptions are "persons" who deserve their choices to be respected too. I hold that being Pro-Life is actually Pro-Choice itself - it just includes an extra parameter of choice that people ignore: That of the fetus' choice. I can only assume that they want to live themselves. All life seeks to "Be" something..and fight for it. And this is a form of Life that isn't criminal or trying to harm yet. It hasn't forfeited it's own life by violating others. And even if I detached and depersonalized them as cells and their organic makeup, it's still an amazing example of "cells". The most amazing example that we know. Some odd form of life that seeks not only to live, but to understand the universe itself. One should never get so used to the idea of Life that it becomes passe and you take it for granted. It's a rare thing afaik. The day a society starts to think it isn't is when all hell breaks loose. It's the gateway to all kinds of routine carelessness and death. So even if I acknowledged the need for abortion in some cases, it's not wise to get in the habit of taking on a purely mechanistic and/or materialistic mentality. History has shown the consequences of that, once it becomes the foundation for a society. Be it with wars, industrialization, slavery, etc., etc..

Edited May 28, 2018 by kthompsen

[TheMastersSon]

Yours is a popular opinion among religious groups, and according to your explanation you fall into the one-third of humanity who base their abortion rights position on emotion. Those poor helpless little "persons" etc. The problem is, if you replace the word fetus with sperm in your paragraph it makes as much sense. So what's next, civil laws against masturbation? Such laws would be required in addition to abortion laws for any possibility of moral consistency to exist. It's primarily men who are making the arbitrary decision that 200,000,000 murdered sperm during masturbation are morally A-ok, but one fertilized egg inside a woman is somehow different, and somehow no longer her own cells to choose what to do with. Abortion laws are thus inherently misogynistic and violative of our Constitution. Government has neither the ability nor right to dictate any woman's pregnancy decision, let alone dictate the decisions of all women. Edited May 28, 2018 by TheMastersSon

[kthompsen]

I certainly could be emotional about the subject, but I don't recall feeling anything when typing that.. nor did I write it with any passion. It's kind of strange that you went there, of all things. Not sure what's misogynistic about anything I wrote either. My concept of "life" above is about as generic and abstract as it gets. All I did is adopt the same notion of "choice" that others do - and simply added a parameter. Freedom is great. But the whole notion of individual rights comes with a social contract. One should have freedom to, say, to purchase and build one's home. But that freedom doesn't extend to bulldozing over someone else's property and violating their own freedom in the process.

 

But with abortion, the habit is to just depersonalize and remove all notion of rights of the unborn, and prop up only one person's freedom. This is a sleight of hand to me. And if someone like me raises questions, you get slandered with strange accusations like above (such as misogyny). You're not even allowed to say "Hey, wait a second" without looking like the villain. When all I'm doing is celebrating life. Male or female. :)

 

These sleights of hands have always existed too. It's nothing new. I don't see it as any different than how people once viewed slaves, when they justified buying and purchasing people by simply sidestepping the issue and saying those slaves weren't actually people at all, or only "2/3rds of a man". It's how they the Germans managed to stomach their murder factories for Slavs and Jews, by indoctrinating their soldiers to treat these people as literally vermin or subhuman. They literally believed that it was OK and they were just getting rid of trash. And once society in general starts accustoming itself to this detached viewed of life, you get what Hannah Arendt called the "banality of evil".. the day-in, day-out routine process of death. I'd rather just stay away from things that get me in that habit.

[TheMastersSon]

But with abortion, the habit is to just depersonalize and remove all notion of rights of the unborn, and prop up only one person's freedom.

 

Abortion laws and advocation of these laws necessarily equate to misogyny, because legally, it is impossible for two separate rightsholders to occupy the same physical body. Civil rights absurdly bestowed separately on one blob of cells in a woman's body necessarily entail compromised, ignored and otherwise violated constitutional rights for the rest of her body. There's no way around this reality regardless of what our courts or religions might claim.

[JimboUK]

A previous thread on this was closed because religion was brought into it and it's happening again here, I'm closing this before someone gets themselves in trouble.